Athlete Profile: Alaina Hardie
Sometimes losing weight comes down to a battle of will: choosing healthier foods when sweet and salty snacks are calling out, hitting the gym when all you want to do is hit the couch, and outlasting the temptation to throw in the towel when nothing seems to be working. Success, it seems, often requires the willpower to fight off all that is enticing.
Alaina Hardie never expected that actually fighting would enable her to win the battle against herself, nor that it would help her find the inner power to shape up both mentally and physically. And she never expected that fighting would change her life for the better.
Brazilian jiu-jitsu is a grappling and ground fighting martial art — if you’ve seen the UFC, you’ve probably seen some BJJ. Something about the combat sport just clicked for Alaina; she fell in love with the people, the training, and the sense of empowerment she felt when she was rolling around the mats. Once it took hold of her, nothing kept Alaina from blazing her path, leaving a trail of medals and championship belts behind her.
 Blurry cellphone camera shot, one of the few remaining pieces of "before" evidence |
 Alaina, before: "Probably the bagpiping was at least as unappealing as the squishiness." |
In late 2006, Alaina was over 200 lbs at 5′5″, unhappy and unathletic. She’d been following a high-carbohydrate vegetarian diet that left her listless and carrying a lot more bodyfat than she was comfortable with. She’d endured major surgery, moving house and a variety of life stressors, all of which had left her under-exercised and over-fed.
And then, in the summer of 2007, she started BJJ training.
In less than a year of training, she transformed herself into a champion contender. She earned her blue belt in BJJ from women’s grappling legend Felicia Oh within the first 9 months and then went on to get her purple belt from BJJ superstar Eddie Bravo only 8 months later, an almost unheard-of accomplishment in the sport. With her passion for BJJ driving her forward, she really never even stopped to consider that she was becoming an athlete. It wasn’t until the Arnold Grappling Championships in March 2008, when Alaina won four out of five matches by submission in under a minute, that she started thinking maybe she might have a knack for this grappling thing.
Until that point, Alaina had gotten by without much concern for her nutrition and the role it played in her performance. It’s not that Alaina didn’t think about food. As she says: “I love food. I love to make food. I love to eat food. I love to think about food.” But when she lost an overtime match in the final at the NAGA World Championships to an opponent who was very skilled, and much stronger and better conditioned than she was, Alaina consoled herself by “eating her weight in barbeque”.
After that moment, she realized she was ready to start to do things right. She had decided to compete in the Abu Dhabi Combat Club’s World Championships, the world’s premier invitation-only submission grappling event, and knowing that the best grapplers in the world would be competing in that event, she knew she would have to be in fantastic shape to face them.
With a team of excellent instructors and training partners, the training part was and still comes easy for Alaina. Five mornings a week, she hits her home gym or Bang Fitness for strength and conditioning training: one heavy day, two interval days, one explosive conditioning day. She then trains grappling in the evenings and on the weekends, six days a week, alternating hard sparring days with technique-focused sessions. Just recently, Alaina has started teaching a women’s MMA morning boot camp at Kimonogirl, Toronto’s only women’s BJJ academy, and has had to shift more of her training to the evening. But this hasn’t posed a problem.
Now, she can’t imagine not training. “It keeps me centered and focused. It’s fun. It’s challenging. And I never leave the gym feeling worse than when I came in. If I go for even a day without training, I get anxious. The hardest part is definitely taking a rest day.”
 Bustin' out the pullups with training partners |
 Playing in the park |
Despite facing scary opponents, Alaina’s major challenge usually comes from her childhood love of complex carbs and what she calls her body’s “apparent lack of a satiety mechanism”. Luckily, she doesn’t have much of a sweet tooth and has found a way to balance out her body’s cravings with the right foods to fuel her appetite and performance, while maintaining her weight to still easily compete in her class.
A friend introduced her to the PN system and it’s now become part of her life. Two key strategies for Alaina are carbohydrate timing and getting plenty of fruits and vegetables. For the most part, she sticks to four meals a day, but recently has been experimenting with intermittent fasting on some days, where she will eat all her food for the day between 6 am and noon, and then fast until 6 am the following morning.
Alaina relies on and loves bananas, pears, cauliflower, kale and squash of all kinds, and for most meals, pairs these foods with meat and seafood. She’s become enthusiastically omnivorous: Beef, chicken, turkey, shrimp, salmon, and scallops are all staples in the rotation but right now, Alaina is in a bit of “sausage-phase” -– if its done up sausage-style, she’s all over it. Lunch and dinner are generally quite similar: a kale or spinach salad with some meat, mixed with pesto and stirred into shirataki noodles and squash. The noodles have become Alaina’s “new best friend” as they are extremely low calorie and they leave her feeling full without risking topping out her weight class.
Around her workouts, Alaina relies more heavily on the starchy carbs she loves. Prior to her morning session, Alaina indulges in her “weakness”, an almond milk latte and a banana, and then blends up a post-training breakfast shake of some wild combination of vegetables and fruit. After her evening training session, she will opt for some raw fruit or a fruit shake she has whipped up before leaving for the gym.
Beyond the training and nutrition, it’s been the people involved in the sport of BJJ that have given Alaina the opportunity to take her competition to a higher level. “There are so many awesome people involved in BJJ. I have traveled all over North America and trained with many of the legends of the sport. Everybody has been amazing. I have yet to meet a high-level grappler who wasn’t incredibly friendly and generous with her or his time”.
Thanks to the unfailing support of people like Sheila and Brian Bird of BDB Martial Arts in Calgary and Clint Kingsbury of the Canadian Amateur Wrestling Association, Alaina was invited to be part of the first Canadian national grappling team this past November. Originally from the US, now a proud resident of Canada, Alaina rushed her Canadian citizenship through in order to be able to make it. The team traveled to the FILA World Grappling Championships in Lucerne, Switzerland just before Christmas. Alaina placed 4th in the no-gi event, and earned a silver medal in the gi facing some of the toughest women in the world. That’s pretty amazing on its own, but even more so considering Alaina has less than 2 years of grappling under her belts… her championship belts, that is. And thanks to PN-style nutrition, she easily weighed in at a muscular 152, well under her 158 lb (72 kg) weight class limit, and a long way from her squashy 200-plus-pounds of 2007.
 Facing off against an opponent |
 At the FILA World Championship, December 2008 |
Alaina’s passion for her sport has driven both her accomplishments on the mat and her personal goals. As Alaina continues to develop as an athlete, she also is putting much of her energy into cultivating the sport for women and spreading her passion for BJJ to empower women all over the world. “There just aren’t many women who do grappling, and it’s a small community that needs to be nurtured so it can grow. “ Alaina feels that finding and using what you’re passionate about is the key to discovering what you are made of. “You are capable of so much more than you think. Find your passion and what excites you, surround yourself with positive and supportive people, and believe”.
And the proof is in what Alaina discovered for herself. “I have the willpower necessary to drop 70 lbs and go from an out of shape slob to a world champion in less than a year. If I can do it, anybody can.”
